Microsoft Discloses 14,000 Pages of Coding Secrets

OrochimaruVoldemort writes "In an unexpected move, Microsoft has disclosed 14,000 pages of coding secrets. According to The Register: 'This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.' The article mentioned that this will be done in three phases. 'Between now and June it will garner feedback from the developer community. Then, at the end of June, Microsoft will publish the final versions of technical documentation — along with definitive patent licensing terms.' Lets just hope those terms are pro open source."

Comments

Unexpected?

[Plug]

Unexpected, as in they told us very loudly that they were going to do it?

Re:Unexpected?

[UnknowingFool]

Unexpected as they actually delivered. They had promised several times in the last several years that they would release the documentation but never did. The EU Commission said as much when MS announced the last time they were going to release the documentation:

The European Commission takes note of today's announcement by Microsoft of its intention to commit to a number of principles in order to promote interoperability with some of its high market share software products. This announcement does not relate to the question of whether or not Microsoft has been complying with EU antitrust rules in this area in the past. The Commission would welcome any move towards genuine interoperability. Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today's announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability.

On MSDN already

[just_another_sean]

The prelimnary docs are here.

I have to admit I'm tempted to be interested in the Exchange stuff. The
company I work for uses it. As with most MS products it's not, um, horrible,
when it's working but it's a PITA to troubleshoot problems. The MAPI Tool for
looking at the "innards" is horrible. Maybe this documentation will at least
spawn some better third party management tools that I can convince my employer
to buy.

For now most pages (all?) are prefaced with:

[This topic is preliminary documentation and is subject to change in future documentation releases.] I haven't had a chance to search out legalese to answer the summary's question on open source friendlyness.

I figure a "hope-for-the-best-expect-the-worst" attitude is the best way to approach this one...

Re:Admitting They're Lying is Reassuring?

[Macthorpe]

That's not what they're releasing.

On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. This isn't a list of 'secret APIs' for Windows. This is the stuff that glues their Office system together and they were going to keep a hold of as long as possible. It's completely seperate to the anti-trust concerns you're referencing, but they do seem to be using it as a bargaining chip against the EU investigations. It remains to be seen whether that will work or not.

Re:Why is parent flamebait?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS has NEVER done anything yet that is pro open source.

What about the 700 CSS testcases they recently contributed to the W3C under the BSD license? Or any of their other releases under OSI-approved licenses, for example WIX? Are you seriously going to argue that releasing things under open-source licenses is not pro-open-source?

Re:Ummmm, no

[stavros-59]

People said this same thing when the Windows 2000 source code leaked. Nothing happened. Multiple problems with that theory but one of the biggest is simply that it is wrong. Lots of people have the Windows source code. MS has a license where universities can get a copy for research. One university I know that does is ASU in Tempe, Arizona. So this idea that only MS has ever seen the code is false, thus the argument is invalid, never mind the other problems with it even if it weren't.
I'm not sure that's correct. If you are only talking self-replicating viruses that spread to continue replication, you may be correct. However,the appearance of rootkit anchored malware "in the wild" closely followed that release which made the information widely available outside limited academic and security research circles. The first rootkit was published as far back as 1999 by Greg Hoglund, founder of rootkit.com. There was a lot of academic interest and discussion in rootkit development specifically on Windows NT based systems before that time but almost none had been detected "in the wild". But rootkit anchored, serious malware infections have ballooned are now "professionally" developed for criminal purposes and used as the base for most, if not all, of the botnets. The release of the Windows 2000 source code certainly removed the need for extensive reverse engineering.
The Windows 2000 source code leak dates back to 2004 http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39146176,00.htm

Hackerdefender was also coincidently released early in 2004 by holy father

One of the most frequently encountered is Hacker Defender, created by an Eastern European who calls himself Holy Father. The latest free version was published early in 2004 and, more recently, premium and customized versions of this malware became available for a fee. http://searchwindowssecurity.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid45_gci1112754,00.html